Generating a Site

To generate the project's site and reports, execute:

mvn site

By default, the resulting site will be in the target/site/ directory.

Note: If you have a multi module project, then the links between the parent and child modules will not work when you use mvn site or mvn site:site. If you want to use those links, you should use mvn site:stage instead. You can read more about that goal further down on this page in the section called 'Staging a Site'.

Note: For performance reasons, Maven compares the timestamps of generated files and corresponding source documents, and only regenerates documents that have changed since the last build. However, this only applies to documentation source documents (apt, xdoc,...). If you change anything in your site.xml, any relevant sections in your pom, or any relevant properties or resource files, you should generate the site from scratch to make sure all references and links are correct.

Deploying a Site

To be able to deploy the site, you must first specify where the site will be deployed. This is set in the <distributionManagement> element of the POM as shown below.

<project>
  ...
  <distributionManagement>
    <site>
      <id>www.yourcompany.com</id>
      <url>scp://www.yourcompany.com/www/docs/project/</url>
    </site>
  </distributionManagement>
  ...
</project>

The <id> element identifies the repository, so that you can attach credentials to it in your settings.xml file using the <servers> element as you would for any other repository.

The <url> gives the location to deploy to. In the example above we copy to the host www.mycompany.com using the path /www/docs/project/ over the scp protocol. You can read more about which protocols are supported on this page. If subprojects inherit the site URL from a parent POM, they will automatically append their <artifactId> to form their effective deployment location.

Now you can execute the site:deploy goal from your project directory.

Note: A site must be generated first before executing site:deploy.

mvn site:deploy

If you want to generate the site and deploy it in one go, you can utilize the site-deploy phase of the site lifecycle. To do this, just execute:

mvn site-deploy

Staging a Site

To review/test the generated web site before an official deploy, you can stage the site in a specific directory. It will use the <distributionManagement> element or the project hierarchy to link the project and its modules.

Just execute the site:stage goal from your project

mvn site:stage

Note: A site must be generated first before executing site:stage.

By default, the site will be staged in a directory target/staging/. A different staging location can be chosen with the stagingDirectory parameter as shown below:

mvn site:stage -DstagingDirectory=C:\fullsite

Note: stagingDirectory cannot be dynamic, i.e. stagingDirectory=${basedir}\fullsite

To stage a site and deploy it, execute the site:stage-deploy goal from your project with the required parameters. The site:stage-deploy goal will use the value of distributionManagement.site.id as default id to lookup the server section in your settings.xml; unless this is not defined, then the String stagingSite will be used as id. So if you need to add your username or password separately for stage-deploy in settings.xml, you should use <id>stagingSite</id> for that <server> section. See the Guide to Deployment and Security Settings for more information on this.

By default, the site will be stage-deployed to $distributionManagement.site.url/staging/. A different location can be chosen with the stagingSiteURL parameter as shown below:

mvn site:stage-deploy -DstagingSiteURL=scp://www.mycompany.com/www/project/

Note:A site must be generated first before executing site:stage-deploy.

Running a Site

The Site Plugin can also be used to start up the site in Jetty. To do this, execute:

mvn site:run

The server will, by default, be started on http://localhost:8080/. See https://www.eclipse.org/jetty/ for more information about the Jetty server.

Note: Running a site only works for single-module sites. To preview a multi-module site one should use site:stage.

Rebuilding a Published (Released) Site

In general, site documentation is published as part of a release. This means that changes to the documentation depend on a new release before being visible or you must accept that the documentation refers to a snapshot version instead of the latest release version. To solve that problem, you first need to configure your project for reproducibility by setting the project.build.outputTimestamp model property. Then branch off from the SCM tag you want to modify, perform the changes, commit them and then rebuild, finally publish updated site. The underlying Maven Doxia Sitetools will automatically inject that property as publishDate Velocity context property into the site and the skin won't render a newer (current) date, but use this one. Checkout the publishDate IT for configuration details.